A platform for creating Smartphone apps to enhance Chinese learning using augmented reality

We developed a software system consisting of a container app for smartphones and a web portal. The container app, named “MimasAR” (iOS container app: https://itunes.apple.com/sg/app/mimasar/id988692600?mt=8; Android container app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sg.edu.astar.i2r.mimasar&hl=en) can be used to recognize Chinese characters on printed media quickly and reliably for intuitive and interactive Chinese learning. The web portal – MIMAS (http://scholar-milk.i2r.a-star.edu.sg/mimas3-v6/index.php/home2) is a fast tool for creating various sub-apps within the container app, simply by uploading and linking prepared contents. Teachers or educational content providers can then create smartphone apps easily for their own teaching topics, even without any programming skills. Different from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, which is sensitive to the orientation of the character image and its background, our approach can recognize the character accurately from any angle. It does not matter whether the character is printed in uncommon fonts, on cluttered background or marred by drawings around it. The character recognition is reliable and fast without requiring the user to capture the image from the character at its upright position.